Bob Ross

Many people initially discover their ability to have ASMR through real world experiences.

These experiences may include having their hair being played with by a friend, hearing someone whisper, being examined by a clinician, listening to someone nearby turn the pages of a magazine, or watching someone perform a dedicated task like painting or origami.

Surprisingly, it has turned out that just hearing and/or watching these experiences in a recorded format can also stimulate ASMR.

In 2009, several individuals on the internet began intentionally simulating some of these popular ASMR triggers in videos – giving rise to intentional ASMR videos and ASMR video channels.

But these were not the first videos that people were watching to purposely trigger their deep relaxation and tingles.

Gordon McGladdery is a professional composer and sound designer living in Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada.

He has his Bachelor of Arts in English literature from University of Victoria in Canada and an additional diploma in Sound Design for Visual Media from the Vancouver Film School.

Gordon first learned about ASMR in 2012 and immediately created his own research project.

He analyzed the speech patterns of several ASMR artists (GentleWhispering, VeniVidiVulpes, AppreciateASMR, and others) and compared them to the speech patterns of others (Bob Ross, Bill O’Reilly, Geraldo Rivera, and others).

He initially shared his findings with the ASMR community in an ASMR subreddit thread.

In my interview with Gordon he shares how he first learned about ASMR, the objectives of his study, his ideas about further analysis that could be done on ASMR-related audio, his favorite ASMR artist, and more.

Below are my questions in bold and his replies in italics.

Immediately following the interview is Gordon’s detailed description of how he did his analysis and his data findings.

The post concludes with a podcast Gordon created about his study, as well as, links to his initial ASMR subreddit post, to his spreadsheet of the speech pattern data, to his website, to his musical compositions, and more.